1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to business methods and systems for automatically analyzing in real time a customer's bill, such as a customer's cell phone bill, for errors and utilization of the services or products from the billing company, and providing a report back in real-time to the customer and/or billing company by a third-party providing the corrective actions necessary. The invention is achieved by the billing company, such as a cell phone provider, sending out and/or providing a bill in electronic format to the customer and the customer sending the bill in electronic format to a third-party for the third-party to analyze the customer's bill for errors and utilization of billing received by the customer relative to the billing company's published billing plan previously stored on the third-party's website system.
The analysis of the customer's bill is conducted on the third-party's website system in real-time for errors in the billing and for utilization of the services or products. The analyzed results are prepared into a report to display the results. The customer is advised electronically by displaying in real-time an indication that a report is ready which then allows the customer to enter payment information and/or view promotional materials provided by the third-party and elect to view the promotional materials prior to viewing their report of their analyzed bill for errors and utilization. After reviewing the report of the analyzed bill for errors and utilization, the customer and/or third-party forwards the results of the report to the billing company, such as the cell phone company, for corrective action on the customer's account. After forwarding the report, the third-party destroys the bill received from the customer in electronic format, but collects a summary from all reports generated by category and type of error and utilization by a billing company, but not by individual customer, such as a cell phone user, and stores the collection of summaries for a predetermined time period showing the collective errors and utilization by category for a particular billing company, who can be advised of its collection of errors and utilization. This invention further provides all of the error analysis and utilization analysis of the customer's bill from a billing company by the third-party in real-time, while the customer is online at the third-party's website system. The third-party's summary report generated for the customer is in a format that the customer can forward directly to the billing company for corrective action by the billing company on the customer's account.
2. Description of Related Art
The present invention may be useful in any situation where there are companies, such as cell phone companies, which issue bills to their customer's in large volumes based on published rate plans or services. The prior art required customer's to have significant knowledge about how the industry and/or billing company computed their bills against the rate plans on which the customer's bill was based to even make sense of their bills. Most customer's do not have the knowledge or the data to make such an analysis of their bills against the published rate plan of the billing company, nor do they have the time to do so. Also billing companies, such as cell phone companies, who send out large volumes of bills, have no commercial interest in analyzing the individual bills it sends to its customer's, because it would take too much time and money and it would probably cut into their profit margins.
Because companies bill in mass to a large body of customer's, whose individual bills are relatively small, there is a complete mismatch of interest in the billings and utilization between the customer's billed by the billing companies and the billing companies. This mismatch of interest in the billing errors and utilization errors between the billing companies and the customer's billed, is because there has not been a way to electronically analyze billing errors and utilization in real-time and provide the summary report data individually to the customer's and collectively to the individual billing companies, such as cell phone companies, in a cost effective manner.
While many third-party companies in the prior art have attempted various methods of utilizing and analyzing paper invoices, or credit memorandum or electronic invoices or optical character reader conversions to convert bills into electronic formats for comparison, most have been associated with the building of a baseline template, which analyzes the customer's account in historical time to create a template baseline report. From this historical data, comparisons were made against various billing companies' plans or against the customer's plan. The results were time delayed, however, and were a complicated analysis of the errors and reporting the utilization to the billed customer. These reports were as confusing as the billing company's bill to the customer and did not provide to the customer its analysis in real-time, nor did it provide the analysis to the billing company, such as a cell phone company, for corrective action, which was easy to submit.
Further, because the prior art used historical records, it meant that records were kept over time on the customer which created a security problem both for the customer and for their billing company. The customer's security problem was that it was exposed to potential hacking into the database on which their historical baseline was being kept and the billing company was exposed to liability for loss of the customer's personal data and billing information.
Also most of the prior art was related to customer's being billed by billing companies, not for individual customer's but companies who had many individual users within the company. Therefore the lone customer receiving their individual bill from mass billing company mailings did not have access to a program which could be accessed over the web to assist him in analyzing errors in billing or utilization. Therefore these programs were too expensive, except for companies with many users who could justify the cost of billing analysis for billing errors and utilization reports.
The prior art was also concerned with the generation of payment electronically and otherwise, after the bills had been analyzed and compared against historical billing. In this prior art, after an analysis was completed, it was then passed to an accounts payable system which was needed to pay an invoice or recognize a credit. Clearly, such systems were helpful to companies, but not of much use for individuals.
Also the prior art devised complicated systems and methods, as related to wireless telecommunication data, to receive billing information based on a current rate plan utilizing a transceiver specially configured to store billing information in a processor and process the subscribers billing information to produce organized data on a calling profile record for each telecommunication service being used by the subscriber and then determine the best rate plan which would be most cost-effective based on the historical data generated. Again this approach was useful for companies with many subscribers, but did not have application to individual users.
As the prior art was basically configured for use by companies and organizations, it was by design expensive and would not have application to individual customer's bills, such as individual cell phone customer's.
Further, the prior art systems and methods did not look for a business method which would support some or all of the costs required to support servicing an individually billed customer, and still leave a viable business model for third-party company to operate.
Much of the prior art makes attempts at providing solutions to billing analysis were inefficient and did not provide real-time internet or web analysis to a customer regarding its bill and then provide him real-time solutions to correct its bill with the billing company.
Clearly, the prior art did not address the issue of providing collective summaries of types of errors and utilization by individual billing company through the collection of summary reports for all companies by billing company for a pre-determined time to create a corrective report for a given company, such as a cell phone company, to allow the company to initiate corrective action based on the blind reports by its error and utilization summaries. Nor did the prior art look for outside revenue sources to be used in their business models and methods to help support and create an income stream for a third-party provider based on providing blind summary reports for companies by billing company.
Also the prior art was totally focused on the billing company and the billed customer in its analysis for the correction of billing errors and utilization reporting, and did not look for outside revenue sources to be used in their business models and methods to help support and create an income stream from a third-party based on promotional revenues to help support some of the costs to the billed customer, for making the service affordable to the billed customer.